


the flower that blooms

by desdemona (LydiaOfNarnia)



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, flower symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 09:51:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6748912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydiaOfNarnia/pseuds/desdemona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Nothing is more beautiful than the azalea in full bloom... the spring flower blooms every year, without fail."</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Written for <a href="http://momoisatsukiweek.tumblr.com/">Momoi Satsuki Week 2016!</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	the flower that blooms

On the day she turns eight years old, Daiki gives her a flower.

It’s a bright pink thing -- verging on magenta, it is almost garish in it’s coloring. She holds it up to the light and can’t help but think that maybe, among a large number of its kin, the flower might have been beautiful. As it is, it is still beautiful, but a wilting sort of beauty -- the type of beautiful that makes her think the flower is very tired, and just trying to bloom brightly for a little bit longer. It’s petals are widespread and drooping, curling slightly at the ends; it’s long stem still has a few leaves attached, but one by one they are quickly wilting and dropping away.

She lowers the flower and turns to look at Daiki. He is grinning widely at her, hands on his hips, clearly pleased with his gift. Somehow she doesn’t have to think very hard to realize that he probably just plucked this flower from one of the gardens he passed with his parents on the walk to her house.

She’s never received a flower from a boy -- never received flowers from anyone, actually, unless her parents count -- but she knows it’s supposed to be a special thing. Boys give flowers to girls they like. Only, Daiki is loud, reckless, with a tendency to be mean; even if she _did_ like him that way, she thinks, she doubts he would make a very good boyfriend anyway. She doesn’t think Daiki even put that much thought into giving her the flower; indeed, his next words all but confirm it.

“Pretty nice, huh Satsuki? I got it because it reminded me of you. You kinda look like it, d’you know that?”

She blinks down at the pink blossom in her hands trying to see any sort of resemblance. She can find none; aside from the bright hue of her hair, maybe, and she wouldn’t be surprised if Daiki’s creativity began and ended there. Yet somehow she can’t help but wonder if there’s something more to it than that.

A ways behind her she can hear the bustle of her birthday party in full swing; her parents had gone all out this year, inviting all her friends from school, as well as some people she didn’t even like. She wasn’t sure what had excited Daiki more -- the cake, or the bouncy house that had become the highlight of the party.

Now, standing in front of him in her pretty white party dress, flower clutched in hand and polished black shoes scuffing in the dirt, Satsuki wonders just why this flower has to be like her. It is a wilting, tired looking thing; she is only eight years old, and though that seems very old to her she knows that it is, in they eyes of any adult, quite young. (Maybe Daiki only thinks such a thing because he’s younger than her -- still being only seven.) She is not wilting, and she is not fragile. She is not a flower plucked by the hand of a careless little boy to give to a girl he calls his best friend.

“I don’t think it looks like me at all,” she replies finally, blinking large pink eyes at her friend. Daiki pauses, a look of bafflement crossing over his face for a split second -- _wondering how she can’t see it_ \-- before he snorts and turns away.

“Whatever,” he replies, and Satsuki doesn’t want to deal with Daiki getting into one of his moods on her birthday. Rolling her eyes, she turns on her heel and takes off back into the heart of the party. The flower is forgotten on one of the picnic tables as she clambers into the bouncy house, little Daiki hot on her heels. The rest of the party is spent competing with each other to see who can do the best flips (Satsuki wins) and who can slide down the massive slide in the most ridiculous way possible (Daiki wins, but only because he tries to do a barrel roll and winds up falling over the edge halfway down the slide).

That night, after Satsuki is securely tucked away in bed, her parents box up the remains of her eighth birthday party and slip it away into the attic, memories to be uncovered at a later time. The flower winds up there, shut away at the very top of the box. Satsuki doesn’t think about it again, not the next day, nor the next year, nor for many years to come.

❀❀❀

Her parents finally decide to move just before she is to enter her first year of college. Satsuki is living in a constant state of buzzing excitement; Tokyo Junshin Women’s College had been one of her top choices, and while with her grades and extracurricular record many people had assured her that there was _no doubt_ she would be able to get in, she had been reluctant to trust even her own analysis (she’d weighed and analyzed the statistics at least five times over) until the letter of acceptance was in her hand.

Her parents are older now; packing is much more difficult for them, so Satsuki, dutiful daughter that she is, doesn’t even consider not reporting to her parents’ house bright and early on moving day to help coordinate the relocation of her childhood home. Also not considered twice is the includance of Daiki -- for all the time he’d spent at her house growing up, he’s practically the son the Momoi parents never had. That doesn’t keep him from grumbling, of course _(“it’s eight in the morning, Satsuki, why would anyone want to move at eight in the morning?”)_ or trying to sneak in naps wherever he can find an empty room. This is how Satsuki find him in the attic, dozing against a stack of boxes he was supposed to be unpacking. When repeated calls of his name refuse to rouse the stubborn beast from the depths of slumber, she finds that a swift kick to the shin works just as well.

“You shouldn’t be sleeping in the first place,” she scolds, leaning down and hefting up a cardboard box labeled _‘Satsuki’s Baby Things’._ “You’re the muscle of this operation, Dai-chan. Muscle can’t afford to be lazy.”

“Muscle is joining an internationally ranked team this year, so I think I’m allowed to take a nap,” Daiki mutters, but -- just as she’d known he would -- he pulls himself up anyway, sitting on his knees and turning to look back at the box he had just been snoozing on. “The hell is all this stuff, anyway?”

“Not all of them are labeled,” she replies with a shrug, just before her head vanishes through the floor of the attic. She descends the ladder carefully, making sure to watch her footing so as not to lose it; still, she’s happy to pass of the surprisingly heavy box to one of the nice moving men she finds upstairs. When she climbs back into the attic again, she feels a twinge of annoyance to find Daiki rummaging through one of the very boxes he’s supposed to be helping carry.

“Don’t open them!” she exclaims, but Daiki doesn’t spare her a glance. His attention is captured by something in the box in front of him. Leaning over it, his face splits into a grin.

“Oi, Satsuki, look at this. D’you remember the day I gave this to you?”

Satsuki peeks over his shoulder, and her eyebrows raise when she realizes he is studying a very old, very wilted flower. It’s petals have long since faded from the hues of bright pink into a subdued cacophony of brown and grey; they seem all but ready to crumple into dust at the slightest touch. Daiki actually does brush one of the petals with his index finger, and a large portion of the fragile skeleton crumples away. “Oops.”

“You said the flower reminded you of me,” she says softly, her lips pursed.

Daiki chuckles. “Yeah, still does. Just as ugly now.”

She huffs and resists the urge to hit him on the back of the head -- if she hasn’t gotten used to Daiki’s lip now, she figures she never will. The flower she sees resting atop her eighth birthday mementos, however, is not a wilted, long dead echo of once was -- in her mind it is still as bright and garish, and bold and beautiful as the day Daiki had presented it to her.

_(A confident smile, extending his hands to reveal a brightly colored blossom -- “it’s yours,” he says, and her eyes widen as she takes it.)_

“It was an azalea,” she remarks now, realizing for the first time; she knows much more about flowers than she did when she was a little girl, and with the memory still so fresh in her mind it is not hard to identify the type of flower Daiki had given to her. “Those only bloom once a year. In the spring.”

“Seasonal, huh?” Daiki’s lips quirk up as he tilts his head to look at you. “Like you. No wonder that flower looked so much like you.”

Even after ten years, she still feels the answer tugging at the strings in the back of her mind; reaching for it is like trying to grab hold of a butterfly’s wing. While she knows, in her own mind she thinks she finally understands just what makes her and the May flower so similar, she can’t pass up the chance to ask Daiki while he’s right in front of her.

“Dai-chan? Why did you say the flower reminded you of me? Why, really?”

_(Flowers bloom the brightest in the face of adversity; this is a fact. The azalea is raised into the world by dawning spring warmth and the bright sun, yet it still blooms every year without fail. It is a constant, loyal, practical, beautiful. It is not fragile; it can withstand the harshest of spring storms and still come out bright on the other side. It can be battered and plucked by the selfish hand of a little boy and still bloom on, its memory as fresh a decade ago as it was the moment it entered the hands of a little girl. Maybe she and the tiny flower have more in common than her eight year old self thought.)_

Daiki seems to consider this for a moment, before he turns up to her with a grin once more. “It was the hair.”

“My hair?”

“Yeah. It was the same color as your hair.”

He smiles, and for a moment she can see that bright-eyed little boy in him once more. With a soft huff, she musses her hand through his uncombed mess of hair, deriving a short burst of pleasure fro the way he growls in irritation, before nudging the box shut with her foot. The flower vanishes back into obscurity, the same box that has been its crypt for a decade while the real girl learned to bloom.

“Let’s go downstairs,” she says, and Aomine lifts the box into his arms, rises to his feet, and follows in her stead.

_(She’s not always the girl trailing after someone else. Flowers bloom the brightest in the face of adversity, and azaleas always bloom in the spring.)_


End file.
